Mithridate has shown in London for the past eight seasons, making its official calendar debut during Spring/Summer 2025. After Zhang exited in late 2024, Mithridate founder and CEO Tina Jiang turned her eyes to the UK to find its new direction. “London is such a centre of creativity, and British designers are also running some of the biggest houses in Paris, so it made sense,” Jiang says. She was introduced to Fletcher via a London-based contact, and says she instantly understood his vision for a more pared-back design language, focused on quality, that differs from the current offerings in China.
For Fletcher, who founded his London-based menswear label Daniel W Fletcher in 2015, it presented a fresh challenge. Fletcher also serves as creative director of horse racing event Royal Ascot, mainly working on the annual lookbook to guide attendees on what’s appropriate to wear in various enclosures. (He previously served as creative director of Fiorucci from 2019 to 2023, and has held design roles at JW Anderson and Louis Vuitton.)
“When I first came to China to meet Tina and the team, I didn’t really have an idea of what I was coming into,” Fletcher says, walking me through his vast studio space, with mood boards and fabric swatches lining the walls. Upon arriving in Guangzhou, his first port of call was a mall, where he noticed many Western brands had produced similar lines for the market (a lot of boxy skirt suits and heavy embellishments). “I asked myself, what is it that I do, and where does it fit into this? I was certain I didn’t want to come in and just do what so many European brands in China are doing. I wanted to create something that spoke to my heritage, but made use of the resources and expertise Mithridate has, that’s not already in the market.”
Fusing British inspiration with Chinese manufacturing
Jiang is keen to establish Mithridate as a British-Chinese label, fusing the creativity of London’s fashion scene with the production capabilities of Mithridate’s atelier and its local suppliers. Close to Shenzhen and Hong Kong, Guangzhou is a major Chinese textile manufacturing hub. Inside the Mithridate atelier, around 30 artisans are hard at work, cutting patterns, hand-embroidering sweaters and embellishing toiles by hand based on Fletcher’s designs (for big orders, production will be outsourced to local factories).
